


The Aching Land

by fluffernutter8



Category: Veronica Mars (Movie 2014), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, POV Minor Character, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 17:10:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3075134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Aching Land

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who spent her New Year's Eve writing fanfiction?

Jade has lived in Neptune for half a dozen years before things start to get bad. Five years of feeling at home, of thinking that this place isn’t so much worse than most others and certainly not as bad as Eli claimed, before the first of his cousins is hauled off the street while walking to school as part of the new stop and frisk policy. Another year before her husband gets into a fight at his high school reunion. A handful of hours before she gets the call that he has been shot and that he needs a lawyer.

She leaves Valentina with the neighbor’s grouchy daughter. She hadn’t even considered hiring her for earlier in the night, when there had been weeks to plan and find just the right person to watch their little girl, but there’s a desperation to middle of the night runs to the hospital that defies all routine.

She shows up there in sweatpants and an old shirt of Eli’s, the outfit she had changed into as soon as she got home, and her heels from the reunion, the closest thing to the door as she ran out again. Eli is still in the operating room, and even though the doctor who fills her in gives encouraging words about through-and-through bullets and limited blood loss, no major arteries and full recoveries, they sound so much worse than all those time she had half-listened to them being strewn around on television.

One of the sheriff’s deputies, the mustached one who pulled her over for speeding once and then looked both ways and let her go, finds her in the waiting room. Halfway through his second question, Jade realizes that he is trying to say that Eli being shot wasn’t an accident.

“We don’t even own a gun,” she says in the voice Eli teasingly calls the ice queen special. She draws herself up, thankful for the added height of her heels even as she tries to ignore how ridiculous she must look. “And there’s not a chance that he was out there playing hoodlum, so you should probably go look for other suspects now.”

“Sometimes even spouses don’t know everything,” the deputy mumbles, but the way his mustache twitches slightly makes Jade think that he doesn’t even believe it.

One of the nurses comes to get her then, showing her to the bay where Eli is being wheeled. He is drained and dizzy from the anesthesia; the effort it takes to focus on her is obvious in his face. She presses her fingers into the empty space of mattress beside his thigh and smiles at him. She isn’t sure what it is- the ugly hospital lights, or his slow, slurry blinks, or the curve of bandages from beneath his hospital gown that makes it a little hard to breathe- but he looks almost unfamiliar to her. She grips his hand as he drifts away from her, falling into a hazy space of unconsciousness, and doesn’t let go of his skin until she realizes that she needs to let the babysitter go home.

She sleeps in Valentina’s bed that night, the one Eli had put together a few weeks ago, finally acquiescing to the demands for a “big girl bed.” Jade wakes often through that night, eyes shooting open to stare at the princess drawings she had stenciled on the ceiling, a different question blazing in her mind each time: What are they doing to prevent infections and surgical complications? Will Eli need physical therapy? Will he be able to work? Will he be able to pick up Valentina? Will they be sued? Will they lose the house?

When she awakes just after six AM to Valentina delightedly patting at her cheeks and neck, the first thing she thinks is: how will we stay here after this?

* * *

Jade knows from the second Eli comes to lean against the door to their bedroom that she isn't going to like what he has to say. But she smiles when she looks up at him, because he looks like he could use a smile and because she is hoping that maybe he will see it and decide not to tell her whatever he is preparing to.

It half works. He is just slightly less tense as he comes to sit on the edge of the bed. Still, she notices that he lowers himself a little stiffly; his shoulder continues to bother him, especially at the end of the day.

He has chosen the edge closest to the door instead of his usual side, and she sets her papers aside and moves to sit beside him.

“You have a minute?” he asks.

“Even during tax season, I’ve got a minute for you,” she says, hoping for the familiar “world’s hottest CPA” joke that would let her breathe just that much easier.

It doesn’t come, and she waits for another minute until he starts talking. “I think that maybe you and Valentina should go away for a while.”

“And then in a few days you’ll come and join us on this fantastic vacation you’re sending us on?” The words she had meant to be light bulk into mountains as fear and just a little anger slither into them.

“I was thinking you should stay with your mom for a while. Away from here.” His words are mountains too, with hidden crevices that she can peer into easily. _Away from me_ , he is saying.

“I think that Valentina will miss her daddy. And I’ve really started appreciating the leather jacket.”

He pushes up from the bed with a slight, aching shrug as he stands fully. “Are you really joking about this? It hid it for a while, but this place is still hell, and I can’t have my family here.”

“So we’ll all leave.”

“No.” He turns away from her. They’ve been keeping their voices pitched low for Valentina, and with his back to her Jade can barely hear him. “I have to protect what I can here. But I’m not willing to risk you for that.”

“I’m willing,” Jade says. She stands, moving closer to Eli. “You have to do what you can here and I love you for it. But we aren’t going to leave you to do it alone.”

“You’ll be in danger because of it. You’re going to look back at this one day and think, ‘damn, I wish I’d walked down that easy road.’”

“And on that day you’ll get to say your ‘I told you so,’” Jade says. She rests her forehead on the back of her husband’s neck, right above the tattoo there. It is Valentina’s name formed into a tiny, curving heart. It’s the last tattoo he got, inked right after their daughter was born, carved right above his spine because his little girl is what kept him upright. “But you know that you never get to say that.”

Beneath her hands, she can feel his shoulders soften just a little. Jade sometimes pictures Eli as a tree, rooted to Neptune, to his family here, bowing in an effort to protect them all from without. And she knows then that the only way to stay here is to burrow the roots in deeper, to claim this place inch by inch, to cling to it, brick and mortar, blood and bone.

**Author's Note:**

> For vmficrecs December prompts. Summary quote from Maya Angelou.


End file.
